To quantify the implications of common currencies for trade and income, we use data for over 200 countries and dependencies. In our two-stage approach, estimates at the first stage suggest that belonging to a currency union/board triples trade with other currency union members. Moreover, there is no evidence of trade-diversion. Our estimates at the second stage suggest that every one percent increase in a country’s overall trade (relative to GDP) raises income per capita by at least one third of a percent. We combine the two estimates to quantify the effect of common currencies on output. Our results support the hypothesis that important beneficial effects of currency unions come through the promotion of trade.

NOTE: International Finance Discussion Papers are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comment. References in publications to International Finance Discussion Papers (other than an acknowledgment that the writer has had access to unpublished material) should be cleared with the author or authors. Recent IFDPs are available on the Web at www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/. Monetary union, price level convergence, and inflation: How close is Europe to the United States?

Twenty-four recent studies have investigated the effect of currency union on trade, resulting in 443 point estimates of the effect. This paper is a quantitative attempt to summarize the current state of debate; meta-analysis is used to combine the disparate estimates. The chief findings are that: a) the hypothesis that there is no effect of currency union on trade can be rejected at standard significance levels; b) the combined estimate implies that currency union approximately doubles trade; and c) the estimates are heterogeneous and not consistently tied to features of the studies. While there are costs and caveats, the scale of these benefits means that Singapore should consider currency union. JEL Classification Number: F34

In 2005 all ECB publications will feature a motif taken from the €50 banknote. This paper can be downloaded without charge from

I investigate the determinants of business cycles synchronization, across regions and over time. I use both international and intranational data to evaluate the linkages between trade in goods, trade in financial assets, specialization and business cycles synchronization in the context of a system of simultaneous equations. In all specifications, the results are as follows. (i) Simultaneity is important, as both trade and financial openness have a direct and an indirect effect on cycles synchronization. (ii) Countries with liberalized capital accounts (and States with high degree of risk sharing) are significantly more synchronized, even though they are also more specialized. (iii) Specialization patterns have a sizeable effect on business cycles, above and beyond their reflection of intra-industry trade and of openness to goods and assets trade. (iv) The role of trade, in turn, is in line with existing models once intra-industry trade is controlled for. Furthermore, trade-induced specialization has virtually no effect on cycles synchronization. The results obtain in a variety of cross-sections and panels. They relate to a recent strand of International Business Cycles models with incomplete markets and transport costs, and on the empirical side, point to an important omission in the list of criteria defining an Optimal Currency Area, namely specialization patterns.

This paper examines whether European monetary union has lowered the degree of price dispersion among member countries. A number of different estimation methods are applied to four independent datasets containing prices of identical goods. While the results reported in the paper vary somewhat across goods, they provide little overall support of the European Commission’s claim that the single currency would significantly deepen market integration among the euro-zone countries. Even though this should be viewed as preliminary evidence, it does suggest that there are other, more important impediments to market integration in the EU. JEL classifications: F15, F33, F36 1 1

Clara Zverina for research assistance, and Ernesto Stein (who was originally going to be a co-author of this paper). Andy Rose (2000), followed by many others, has used the gravity model of bilateral trade on a large data set to estimate the trade effects of monetary unions among small countries. The finding has been large estimates: Trade among members seems to double or triple, that is, to increase by 100-200%. After the advent of EMU in 1999, Micco, Ordoñez and Stein and others used the gravity model on a much smaller data set to estimate the effects of the euro on trade among its members. The estimates tend to be statistically significant, but far smaller in magnitude: on the order of 10-20 % during the first four years. What explains the discrepancy? This paper seeks to address two questions. First, do the effects on intra-euroland trade that were estimated in the euro’s first four years hold up in the second four years? The answer is yes. Second, and more complicated, what is the reason for the big discrepancy vis-à-vis other currency unions? We investigate three prominent possible explanations for the gap between 15 % and 200%. First, lags. The euro is still very young. Second, size. The European countries are much bigger on average than most of those who had formed currency unions in the past. Third, endogeneity of the decision to adopt an institutional currency link. Perhaps the high correlations estimated in earlier studies were spurious, an artifact of reverse causality. Contrary to expectations, we find no evidence that any of these factors explains a substantial share of the gap, let alone all of it.

Empirical research on the gravity model of international trade in the wake of Rose (2000) affirms that currency union formation doubles or triples trade. However, currency unions could also be established precisely because trade among their members was already high. In OLS estimation, this would cause endogeneity bias. The present paper employs both fixed effects and binary choice methods to trace endogeneity in the formation of historical currency arrangements. Studying the formation of currency blocs in the 1930s, we find strong evidence of endogeneity. We work with country group fixed effects and find that already in the 1920s, trade within the later currency blocs was up to three times higher than on average. The formal establishment of these blocs had only insignificant or even negative effects on the coefficients. We also employ a probit approach to predict membership in these later arrangements on the basis of data from the 1920s. Results are remarkably robust and again indicate strong self-selection bias. Evaluated against the control groups, treatment effects in the 1930s were mostly absent. Even the post-war currency arrangements are visible in the inter-war data. In line with the theory of optimum currency areas, our results caution against optimism about trade creation by currency unions.

The ratio of world trade to output was a mere 2 % in 1800, but it then rose to 10 % in 1870

The adoption of a common currency by 12 European countries has been a fascinating live experiment. Unsurprisingly, it has drawn the attention of economists from all over the world, and continues to do so. Surprisingly, perhaps, economists have disagreed and quarrelled on every issue, big and small. Maybe as a consequence, policy makers have